Bell Curves!

I had drafted this post a little more than a week back. 

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I have been neck deep into moderations (fitting employees in bell curve) over last half a week. I managed to complete the exercise by the end of the working week too. There was this sense of exaltation when I completed the exercise.

Over weekend, I have been wondering 'Moderation exercise has been completed successfully. But  has that ensured in better performance management?'

This question led me to another question 'Why do we have performance management systems? Why are they required?'.

The following are my answers. A good performance management system would have 4 elements effectively incorporated:

• Goals- clarity, mutual acceptance (SMART is one way of defining characteristics of effective goals), etc.
• Work planning- it's important that along with the 'what' the 'how' also gets captured. The 'How' is largely company specific.
• Review/feedback- an individual needs to know whether s/he is headed in right direction; and what changes in 'what' and 'how' need to be made.
• Rewards- employees must experience rewards process to be procedurally and distributively just.

What I experienced over last week was only distribution part of 'rewards' piece in the performance management framework.

I am eager to see what is the quality of discussions between a manager and his/her reporting employee at goals, work planning, and review/feedback stages.

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Sourav